Play Games! Get Paid!

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Evening rush hour is in full swing, and Armond Williams wants to kill. He enters Zones arcade in suburban Bellevue, Washington, and steps toward a purposeful cluster of teenage boys. They huddle around a videogame, Killer Instinct, the latest coin-op to hypnotize America's youth and probably the one most likely to send Tipper Gore into conniptions.

Following proper house etiquette, Williams places his quarters on the machine's deck and waits. Taking an unspoken cue to kneel his 6-foot-3 frame into position, he trades a nod with the champion of the moment and has a go at the game.

The pair commences battle on the roof of a post-apocalyptic skyscraper unlike anything you've ever seen. Killer Instinct is a long way from Pong. Suggested control-panel moves read like algorithms: ICHI (Ni-San) WITH QP (x3) + QK OR MK. Both players duck and weave as they pound on a half-dozen buttons and two distressed joysticks to make their 3-D-generated counterparts pummel each other onscreen.

Thunder makes quick dispatch of B. Orchid, hurtling her to certain, if temporary, death over the side of the high-rise. This surprises and amazes the gathered audience: these kids aren't used to seeing an old guy like 25-year-old Williams kick such serious ass.

After a particularly manic attack complete with hatchet flutters and a soul-splitting shriek to the heavens, a spectator breaks down and asks Williams during a pause in the action, "How the fuck d'ya do that?"

Same way you get to Carnegie Hall, Billy Boy. And if you're real good, you'll get paid to do it. Armond Williams is a game tester at Nintendo of America Inc. in Redmond, Washington – a subsidiary of Japan's Nintendo Co. Ltd., the US$4.7 billion, 800-pound, necktied Kong of the videogame industry.

That's right: he plays videogames for a living. In fact, he plays games so much and so well, he's been promoted. Nintendo pays hundreds of gamers living in the greater Seattle area to not only play all day but talk on the phone at the same time to other gamers. God bless America! Take that, you Microserfs!

Nintendo of America, with its 1,300 employees, is just one of eight subsidiaries of parent company Nintendo Co. Ltd.; Williams works for Nintendo of America's Product Acquisition and Development Testing department. The department will bug-test approximately two dozen titles this year. Some of the titles tested are developed in-house, some are translations of games produced by the parent company, and the rest are accepted after testing from more than 600 licensees around the world.

The testing staff fluctuates between eight and twelve, depending on release schedules and product cycles. Achieving the status of tester is not easy. These are the cream of a game-playing, phone-answering crop 450-strong inside Nintendo's Call Center – some have been clocking hours since the late '80s to become Nintendo's game-playing élite.

It would be tempting to clump the testers into a nerdy-Gen-X/slacker stereotype since most are in their mid- to late 20s and male. But a closer inspection exposes distinct differences: well-fed longhairs with a yen for role-playing adventure games sit next to sweat-shirted jocks who prefer street fighting or sports titles.

The one defining characteristic among testers and tester wannabes is what draws Williams into Zones arcade after the proverbial long day at the office – the love of the kill, the solution, the win.

Twenty years ago, there was no such thing as a game tester – Parcheesi was self-explanatory, and too much craps would get you arrested or dead. But in the stretch of one generation, the videogame industry that collects $15 billion annually has also created thousands of adolescent dream jobs in which you play around all day and get a paycheck at the end of the week.

While visions of Nintendo's Redmond headquarters might take on a Willy Wonka-meets-Mission Control mystique, in reality, the offices are decidedly businesslike. Inside the two-story, mirrored bread box (the center of the corporate-park campus) are rows of cubicles outfitted with beige carpeting and track lighting. A raised walkway over an expansive parking lot connects a second, twin building known informally to NOA employees as the Call Center.

More cubicles fill the second floor of the Call Center in groups of four and six. This is where Williams and everyone else start their Nintendo career. And it is where Megan Faris multitasks daily. Faris is a 28-year-old Seattle native who could play one of those grinning MCI operators in the TV commercials. She sits in cubicle #245 with telephone headset, NEC workstation, and Sony Trinitron paused on the 10th level of Super Tetris. Above her head hangs a telecaster with a long number of waiting calls and an exact accounting of the time the calls have been on hold. The callers are waiting to hear from either one of Nintendo's call service representatives or gameplay counselors.

Faris is what is known at NOA as a super agent. She handles incoming calls on Nintendo's hot lines, sometimes in French, which she speaks fluently. Service reps take basic consumer service questions culled from Nintendo's 1-800 number. Technophobic parents often call the day after Christmas as they try to plug in the Super NES machine. Sometimes it's a kid looking to renew his Nintendo Power magazine subscription.

Counselors handle a different breed of caller. This is where the title "counselor" really fits the job description. Frustrated game players with sore thumbs and grinding headaches call a $1-a-minute 900 number to try to cull tips or secrets that will help win or solve a game. (Purists who insist on mastering games on their own would call it telecheating.) Since 1986, Nintendo operators have answered almost 44 million calls for information or service. Conversations like the following are fielded by Faris and a fluctuating staff of up to 450 agents from 4 a.m. to midnight, 365 days a year:

Caller: Um, How do you get to the, um, the, the….

Counselor: The what?

Caller: The uh….

Counselor: [In chirpy voice] How far into the game are you?

Caller: I'm only one sorcerer into the upper tundra.

Counselor: Do you mean the upper tower?

[Three minutes later]

Counselor: [Not as chirpy] You can't get a bottle by throwing at rubies.

Caller: Where do you go to get one?

Counselor: Well, that depends on which bottle you're looking for.

Caller: I have one from the village. Now I'm looking for the fourth one.

Counselor: Oh, you won't get the fourth one for a while. The one that you can get is, when you go to the lake in the light world….

Caller: Yeah?

Counselor: And swim up the river that goes to the castle? Swim under the bridge. Once you swim under the bridge, you should be able to find the bottle.

Caller: Really?

Counselor: Yup.

Caller: Cool. Thanks.

Like many jobs involving shift work, turnover in the Call Center can be high: counselors must handle anxious and sometimes irate customers. College students use the flexible hours to work around classes. Some operators who might have more to their lives than just a videogame addiction seem content with mastering Mario while on the clock. Others start to show not only gaming talent but a passion to join the corporate fold and become Nintendo lifers.

Faris has been playing videogames since she started on Atari as a teenager, and quickly learned to master most every title ever made for that platform. She applied to Nintendo like most of her co-workers, after noticing an ad in the local paper.

She likes the flexibility of her schedule because it lets her take post-graduate public relations classes at night. "I like it right where I am," says Faris. "The callers always keep the job interesting. Also, you can't beat the work environment. The people here want you to play around."

Faris can see herself staying with Nintendo but perhaps moving to another department on an administrative level. According to Don James, vice president in charge of product acquisitions and testing, 90 percent of NOA's employees rise through the ranks at the Call Center. Nintendo's corporate culture is one that makes people want to stick around – after all, no one is making widgets here; they're creating games.

While Faris seems to enjoy her job well enough, she doesn't harbor the same ambitions as Mark Coates. Another well-scrubbed member of the Call Center, Coates is a center team leader, overseeing and helping service reps and counselors. A counselor since 1989, he knows the inner workings of the Call Center and introduces other old-timers with excited camaraderie as he comes across on a tour through the cubicles.

Ask Coates why he likes working for Nintendo so much and he replies in what seems like a bit of contrived and coached job-interview lingo: "There is great opportunity and stability with Nintendo. The work environment is fun, and I'm able to be part of a team."

But the truth comes out when he talks about the games. Coates's eyes brighten, he begins to gesture enthusiastically, and he loses the corporate-speak when talking about his favorite titles in the Call Center's library. He describes gleefully how, along with an employee handbook and an identification card, the company hands you an NES, Super NES, and a Gameboy upon hire.

Nintendo encourages game playing as much as possible – at work and at home – whenever and wherever you can. The library lends a Nintendo catalog of more than 1,600 titles, from Aero Fighters to Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel, for use at work or the home office. Coates, along with Williams and a few others, define points in their lives with respective game title releases.

Williams, Coates, Faris et alia are bright, college-educated twentysomethings who in years before Pong could have started their way up the ladder in any white-collar field and found considerable success. They aren't strung-out genius millionaires like some of their Microsoft neighbors. They are regular people with extraordinary jobs.

Some gamers border on the obsessive. Killer Instinct always draws a crowd in Cafe Mario, Nintendo's cafeteria and free arcade. There are reports of employees finishing eight-hour shifts at the company only to head to the Killer Instinct machine until midnight, sleep in their cars, and be right back at it when the doors open again at four in the morning.

While Coates won't cop to slumber parties in the parking lot, he does admit to taking his work home. "Sometimes, my wife will want to go out to dinner or to a movie, and I'll put her off until I've finished another level or two. But now, she pulls the same thing with me!"

Recently married, Coates is starting to think about the long haul. He sees Nintendo as a career option. The money can be very decent. Nobody talks directly about salaries, but with semiannual bonus incentives, gamers can pull in more than $30,000 a year. Yet it seems that what Coates really wants to be at Nintendo is a tester.

Within the pool of service reps and counselors in the game center, certain players gain reputations for their prowess in different game categories. Games tend to fall into the following schools: role-playing, puzzles, sports, action-adventure, and street-fighting. Guess which discipline Armond Williams studied? "With the street-fighting games, it's definitely the stereotypical man thing. Come and try to beat me. You want to impress the people out there – beat everybody's butt. I just happen to have the knack and the interest."

When Williams started working at NOA in June 1990, he didn't take the job too seriously. After a few months of playing games and getting paid, he quit and went back to school at a local community college. But he eventually tired of the books, realized where his passions ran, and returned to Nintendo with an agenda: don't play around. He played the game incessantly, knowing each move and character inside and out.

"Street Fighter II was in the arcade at the time, and I was spending all my waking hours playing. When I heard during training that the game was going to come out for the Super NES, I was stoked."

When Williams graduated training a second time in 1992, he was asked if he would write fight scenarios ("You have now entered the dark chamber") and proofread instructions for the Street Fighter II Turbo guide.

Williams and a few other chosen ones were again called over the walkway to corporate offices in June 1994. This is where the magic happens. A cluster of offices and conference rooms, named the Treehouse after Donkey Kong's digs, is accessible only with proper security clearance. The three games under development at the time were Killer Instinct, Uniracers, and Donkey Kong Country, the huge NOA release last year.

The Treehouse is where the brain trust of producers, consultants, licensees, and execs formulate and decide the fate of Donkey and Diddy Kong. And this is where Donkey Kong Country was nurtured into the fastest-selling game in videogame history, pushing 500,000 units in its first week in release and well over 7.5 million copies to date.

Williams describes the moment that playing a game became work. "They said, 'Well, you'll be down here playing Donkey Kong Country and, just to let you know, you'll be playing the game quite a bit.' And I said, 'Yeah, I know.' And they said, 'No, you'll be playing this game a lot.' And I did. I can play the entirety of DK Country and find every prize within an hour."

Williams's most recent project was Earthbound, a role-playing game produced in Japan. Before the game can be released to a North American market, everything needs to be translated and fit into the text boxes. The cute little boys and girls with happy little colors in Earthbound don't exactly enthrall Williams like the slash and burn of Killer Instinct – but hey, that's why they call it a job.

Williams lives with his cousin in Kirkland, Washington, eight minutes from work. Although he won't say that his job is his life, the two seem inextricably combined. When Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter were the rage, he'd allot a couple of hours each day on the weekend to go out and play. Williams still follows the same regimen whenever a new title is released.

"I'll run through it a few times. Glean some information from my fellows on the Internet, learn the new moves and everything." He doesn't play videogames at home for work – unless he's really backed up on a certain project. "If I don't have the time to play it at work, I'll ask to take it home with me, and practice there."

Williams is used to the wide-eyed glares he gets when talking about his job. "Let's say I'll meet someone at a nightclub and the icebreaker will be a question like, 'What do you do?' I'll say I work for Nintendo. Then they'll ask the inevitable. 'Wait a minute. You mean you play games or something?'

"I don't get paid a king's salary, but it pays the bills. When I tell people that, they can't knock it. My brother and friends think it's great. They'll call me up for some tips. My mom and dad don't care just as long as I'm staying out of trouble and am independent."

Williams is cool about his feelings for the job, but his happy hour activities belie that nonchalance. Back in Zones, Williams finishes schooling the teenagers on Killer Instinct to take a tour of the rest of the arcade. He points out rows of old machines from his past, now cast in unplugged corners next to Pac-Man and Asteroids. Each abandoned game is another milestone, another step along his career path.

Williams is the last guy you would expect to get weepy. But as he rattles through the games of his youth, he sounds like a high school All-American reminiscing on past games and what those early days mean to him now. "When Street Fighter II came out,

I was there. When Mortal Kombat I and II came out, I was there. It goes without saying that when Mortal Kombat III comes out – I'm there, dude. And I'm gonna do whatever it takes to know that game inside and out, to be the one to beat."

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